NetBSD 11.0 RC7, FreeBSD ports history rewrite, FreeBSD Q2 2026 status and more
Releases
NetBSD 11.0 RC7 available: The NetBSD project announces the seventh release candidate for 11.0, encourages testing, and notes that ISO images are split into CD and DVD variants with full features.
BSDSec
Action Required: Recent ports history has been rewritten: FreeBSD’s ports tree history was rewritten to remove a 150MB binary file that broke mirroring, with a reproduction script provided for users and downstreams to align their local repositories.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed available.
News
FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2026: The second 2026 status report covers 41 entries including FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE, CRA readiness and SBOM work, bhyve CPUID control, kernel suspend/resume, hibernate, CPPC, wireless and DRM updates, ROCm support, cluster refresh, Bugzilla improvements, and more.
BSD Now 673: There’s somebody at the door: This episode covers leaving port 22 open to the internet, FreeBSD Foundationals on the boot process, GhostBSD’s March 2026 finance report, making a read-only device with NetBSD, and more.
httpd(8) gains support for custom HTTP headers: OpenBSD’s httpd now supports setting, adding, or removing custom HTTP response headers via new directives in httpd.conf, enabling security headers and metadata without FastCGI or relayd.
BSDCan 2026 Travel Report – Novković: A FreeBSD Foundation travel grant recipient recaps BSDCan 2026, covering FreeBSD devsummit talks on LLM-driven kernel security, embedded GPS NTP appliances, infrastructure and cloud expansion, scheduler work, network stack and VM improvements, plus conference talks on OpenNTPD history, FreeBSD 15.0 release, ZFS AnyRAID, hibernation support, TLS, /dev/null internals, and UFS support.
BSDCan 2026 Travel Report – Patrick McEvoy: Patrick McEvoy recaps BSDCan 2026 and the FreeBSD DevSummit, noting successful streaming via ScaleEngine, a new microphone system for DevSummit Q&A, Brooks Davis presenting from a CheriBSD box, AI integration talks, improved AV and social media coordination, and nearly $2,000 raised for local charities.
BSDCan 2026 Trip Report – ShengYi Hung: ShengYi Hung recaps BSDCan 2026, covering DevSummit discussions on AI’s impact on FreeBSD maintainability, presenting USB stack and CPU throttling work, and highlighting talks on heterogeneous scheduling and Thread Local Storage.
Tutorials
Migrating my NAS from TrueNAS Core to vanilla FreeBSD: A detailed walkthrough of replacing TrueNAS Core with a minimal FreeBSD 15.1 install, covering ZFS pool import, zero-write USB boot tuning, moving write-heavy paths to an SSD, and rebuilding monitoring with Bastille jails and custom SMART scripts.
If Scrubs Hurt, Your ZFS Design Is Broken: Explains why painful ZFS scrubs signal a pool lacking IOPS and metadata performance, and how adding a special VDEV for metadata offload to SSDs or NVMe can speed up scrubs, resilvers, and daily operations without a full redesign.
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